In pictures: Celebrating 100 years of IBM

To mark IBM's centenary year, CIO Australia has put together a slideshow of the company throughout the past 100 years.

1900s: The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. (later renamed IBM) opened its first office in Chicago in 1914. This building housed employees of IBM's ITR (time equipment), TM (tabulating machines) and Scale Divisions, whose products are displayed in the lower front windows. IBM remained at Number 233 until 1947, when the branch was relocated to 616 South Michigan Avenue.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

1928: An IBM manufacturing plant for Dayton scales in Perth, Australia, 1928. Dayton would later become a division of IBM, which manufactured weight and scale equipment for several decades.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

1932: IBM's Sydney head office in the Queen Victoria Building, 1932, the same year that IBM was incorporated in Australia.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

1937: The Australian "100 per cent" club in 1937, a group for outstanding IBM salespeople. IBM pioneered many aspects of the modern corporation, including the salaried workforce, equal opportunity and equal pay for men and women.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

1955: AGL was the first public utility company in Australia to use IBM Electric Accounting Machines. AGL was an early adopter of new technologies and was later one of the first Australian companies to purchase an IBM 650, which was used in conjunction with punched card machines such as sorters, collators and accounting machines.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

1957: The placement of the four-foot, double sided Tower Clock at the Sydney head office of the ANZ Bank in October 1957. From the close of the 19th century through to 1958, IBM and its predecessors manufactured and sold a range of devices and systems to record, use, transmit and display time.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

1958: Typists at the Attorney General's Department using IBM Executive Electric Typewriters in 1958. The units saved the department 75 per cent of annual patent registration costs. Later, the IBM Selectric typewriter would become the most successful electric typewriter model ever made, dominating the high-end office typewriter market for 25 years.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

1958: An IBM Master Clock at the [[xref:http://www.lighthouse.net.au/lights/sa/cape%20borda/cape%20borda.htm|Cape Borda lighthouse]] on Kangaroo Island in 1958. As well as automating the lighthouse, the clock sent call signals to ships. The IBM Master Clocks controlled both radio and light beams, and transformed the lighthouse into a fully automated, unattended radio beacon.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

1958: The Department of Social Services using IBM tabulating equipment in 1958. The department pioneered a new approach to gathering information, by issuing cards to hundreds of thousands of Australian households receiving child support. From the 1950s through to about 1970, IBM punched cards were the primary way corporations and governments stored and accessed information, making the cards the most durable, successful data storage medium since the book.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

1960: Frank Gibbons and J.R Dickson inspect the typewriter output of the newly installed IBM/360 at AC Nielsen in the 1960s. IBM equipment was used to process consumer surveys and retail audit-based services. The System/360 ushered in the era of computer compatibility — for the first time allowing models across a product line, and even from other companies, to work with each other.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

1960: The IBM System/360 Model 65, produced by IBM in the 1960s and 1970s, was used by the Bureau of Meteorology to process weather information, particular important to Australia's primary industries. By 1996, IBM had developed hyper-local weather forecasting capabilities that combined algorithms, computer modelling and visualisation to predict short-range, local weather conditions.

1960s: An IBM System/360 Model 65 is linked on-line to high speed computer terminals at refineries in NSW and Victoria. The terminals were used to transmit data on the performance of refinery equipment, enabling the Model 65 to highlight areas where corrective action should be taken by Shell engineers. The handsets in the foreground provided the computer centre manager with voice communications to terminal operators. IBM technology is still used to optimise the extraction and use of oil around the world, including 3-D seismic modelling to locate fields; sensing technologies to track oil flow; and virtualisation to manage oil tracking and mining remotely.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

1962: The arrival of the IBM 1410 data processing system in Sydney, December 1962. The 1410 was produced by the company from 1960 through 1970.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

1964: The exterior of IBM's Kent Street headquarters in 1964. In the same year, IBM moved its corporate headquarters from New York City to Armonk, New York.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

1966: An air freighter opens to unload the first System/360 mainframe in Australia. It is being installed with Drug Houses of Australia in February 1966.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

The S/360 has been ranked as one of the all-time top three business accomplishments, along with Ford’s Model T and Boeing’s first jetliner, the 707. It set IBM on a path to dominate the computer industry for the following 20 years.

1970: An enquiry office solves an over-the-counter enquiry using the IBM 2260 Visual Display terminal, which brought together a detailed history of customer billing and aimed to help increase customer satisfaction.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

1981: Thanks to the birth of the IBM Personal Computer or PC in 1981, the IBM brand began to enter homes, small business and schools. It offered 16 kilobytes of user memory (expandable to 256 kilobytes), one or two floppy disks and an optional colour monitor.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

More than 13 million lines of software code were written and tested before the Games. More than 7300 IBM PCs and ThinkPads were connected to the Olympic Games information technology network. Some 540 Netfinity Servers supported the Games Management System by storing massive amounts of data, 50 IBM RS/6000 PC and three RS/6000 SP servers managed and organised data generated by Olympics.com and an intranet system, and three S/390 Parallel Sysplex powered the Central Results System.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

2003: IBM introduces a high-end eServer p690 system that provides a 65 per cent performance boost over its predecessor. Each Power4 chip contained 174 million transistors - about 10 times more than those used in today's PCs - and were interconnected by one mile of microscopic copper wiring.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

2004: The first ThinkPad with an integrated fingerprint reader debuts. Selected models of the ThinkPad T42 offered data protection through new biometric capabilities and embedded security subsystem.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

2005: IBM Analysis engineer, Tami Vogel, holds a prototype of the new Cell microprocessor, a collaboration between engineering teams from IBM, Sony and Toshiba. The Cell microprocessor is essentially a supercomputer on a chip and is aimed at the consumer electronics and digital entertainment markets.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

2006: The IBM System p5 595, dubbed 'the world's most powerful server', debuts. The p5-595 used up to 64 POWER5+ microprocessor cores and Dual Stress technology originally developed by IBM for gaming consoles. Dual Stress technology simultaneously stretches and compresses the silicon to deliver increased processor performance and power efficiency.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

2006: IBM announces it will collaborate on the design, engineering and manufacturing of customised high performance, low power consumption microprocessors, to will be used in thousands of antennae spread across the globe - similar to the ones shown here. The antennae will be used to capture radio signals from deep in space as part of an effort to build the world's largest radio telescope to look at and understand the very origins of the universe.

Also: [[artnid:318956|CIO Blast from the Past - 110 Years of IBM technology]].

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